Scientists at the Cern facility report: "At just after 5:20 this morning, two 3.5 TeV (trillion electron volts) proton beams successfully circulated in the Large Hadron Collider for the first time. This is the highest energy yet achieved in a particle accelerator, and an important step on the way to the start of the LHC research programme."

However, the beams were not intended to collide, but that's the next step: The team is aiming to collide the beams at 7 TeV (3.5 TeV per beam).

The current run began on 20 November 2009, with the first circulating beam hitting 0.45 TeV. A new world record was set 10 days later when an energy beam of 1.18 TeV was produced. "By the time the LHC switched off for 2009 on 16 December, another record had been set with collisions recorded at 2.36 TeV and significant quantities of data recorded", says Cern.

As Wired reported earlier this month, the Large Hadron Collider is now to be run continuously for 18-24 months once the 7 TeV collisions have been achieved. Steve Myers, Director for Accelerators and Technology, says that the team will furiously collect data in this time before then closing the collider in the autumn of 2011 for "a long shutdown in which we’ll do all the necessary work to allow us to reach the LHC’s design collision energy of 14 TeV for the next run".